My favorite nugget in Donald A. Ritchie's history of the Washington press corps concerns... Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent. According to Mr. Ritchie, whenever Duranty was in Washington, he would set up shop at TASS, the official news service of the Soviet Union. Mr. Ritchie writes: "Sympathetic to the Soviet regime, Duranty felt more comfortable writing at the TASS office than at the Times's bureau, under the frosty gaze of bureau chief Arthur Krock." ...Duranty had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of articles remarkable for their uncritical praise of Joseph Stalin as the...